Squidoo Lens - The Power of Article Marketing

You measure your Website's success in the amount of traffic you get, estimated in page views or in number of visitors (how many people go and look at the Website).

There are several methods to get your link out to customers:
- Good page rank at search engines
- Get your URL in a news story online and/or offline (including press releases)
- Advertise on search engines and on other Websites
- Advertise via link exchanges
- Advertising in newsletters (advertising on my ezine is still free for subscribers who request it)
- Legitimate emails (no Spam!)
- New Internet and Web 2.0 strategies.

Many of these methods have a problem that makes them either complicated or expensive. Using search engines is the number one way to drive traffic to your site, but it takes time to place well in.

Advertising online and press releases are expensive and drive minimal traffic to your Website. However, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't send out advertising and press releases, but it just means you shouldn't depend only on these methods.

Advertising in email newsletters and ezines are the most cost effective, but they won't drive a large amount of traffic to your Website.

New Internet and Web 2.0 strategies are excellent sources of advertising, but I will discuss this subject in one of my next issues.

To get results you need a lot of traffic, but usually few page views result in an actual purchase, depending on your online business. So what to do? Try the next strategy...

The Power of Article Directories

One great technique of driving traffic to your Website is to write very good quality articles and post them to article directories, such as http://www.AssociateDigest.com , encouraging people to download and use them at no cost.

Article Directories are enormous online resources with thousands of articles on every possible niche market, and they accept articles from almost anyone who wants to provide gratis good content.

But why would you want to give these articles away free of charge? Because with every download your name, your URL and a short description of your business, are required to be set up along with the article in a separate subsection called a "resource box." This means that if few hundreds of Website owners download your article, you have just gotten lots of free links to your Website, many of them from unexpected sources.

Keywords Are Important

The Internet is driven primarily by content, which is driven by keywords. The most important items on your website are not graphics and animation, but good and solid content; keyword rich content. Content that makes the customer go "wow," and then bookmark your site to come back to later.

Keywords should be listed in the metatags, headings, and description of your site, as well as sprinkled through at least the first portion of the article. This tells the search engine spiders how to catalog your site.

Conclusion: include in the article title the keyword you're trying to capture for the search engine optimization! The search engine spiders seeing these link backs will apply every one of these keyword links to your Website's ranking.

Using Content Articles

Content articles relevant to your site, so make them more readable by:
- Keeping your page well-organized
- Minimizing graphics, especially fancy animated ones
- Delivering succinct, readable information (preferably with lots of bullets and headings)
- Eliminating grammar and spelling errors

Both using free downloads and paying for articles have positives and negatives. Here's a breakdown.
- Free downloads are, by definition, free.
- Articles you buy are not. But they are generally not outrageously expensive either.
- The free articles require you to place a "resource box" on your site containing the author's name and, generally, his or her web site address with a link.
- Articles you buy can generally be placed on your website with your name on them as author.

Drive Traffic With Fresh Content

Fresh content - that is the grail of the Internet. Everyone wants to have it on their site, everyone wants to be able to access it on other sites. Audiences are hungry for it. But how do you manage it? And how do you ensure your traffic keeps coming back for it?

Blogging
One of the most popular new methods of constantly refreshing content is by maintaining a blog. This is almost an online personal or public journal you maintain as often as several times a day. One of the best things about blogging is that you can write all your content for a week and store it on the blog engine, setting entries to be released to the public blog daily or whenever you want them released.

Fresh Articles on Your Site
You can also maintain fresh articles on your site weekly or monthly. If you do update articles on a regular basis, make certain that the release date of the current article is prominently displayed somewhere on the article's page so that the surfer can see that the article is fresh.

Become an Expert!

If your article has a good quality content, your name will receive the status of "recognized expert" to every person who reads your article on the other Website. You give away free content, but you get real response in return. It is one of the best forms of free advertising you can find on the net.

What happens if you aren't a good writer? You don't even have to be a talented writer! You can employ a writer to create your articles for you. Or, you can purchase articles from an article broker, getting content and keyword rich articles. Then you can share these articles with other webmasters in exchange for a link to your Website, or post them on article directories.

Using Articles To Sell Your Product

Articles are NOT sales letters! That's where many online business owners mess up. Instead, good quality articles on your website are a method for educating your consumers while simultaneously building up a bank of trust that will ultimately be converted into sales.

Whether you use articles, a newsletter, blogs, ebooks, or reports, or a combination to spread the information your viewers are hungry for, over time your information will start to convert your visitors into customers. You should be patient and responsive, building up your trust bank with your audience and not pushing them until at last, they start to buy your products on their own.

Do you want to make yourself known on the Net? If yes, will you try to write articles and submit them to an article directory, at no cost to you?

Visit http://www.associatedigest.com

Published on Squidoo: http://www.squidoo.com/articlepower